You can earn more money. You can rebuild your health. You can make new friends to replace the ones you lost. Most resources that feel scarce can be regenerated if you invest the effort. Attention cannot. You have a finite amount of attention in your lifetime. When you spend it, it is gone. There is no getting it back. There is no earning more. You get what you get and then you die.
I catch myself being nostalgic for the early 2000s. The internet felt new. Phones were for calling. Social media had not eaten everything yet. Things seemed simpler. Then I remember that the early 2000s included a financial crisis that destroyed people’s retirements, a war that killed hundreds of thousands, and a job market that locked out an entire generation. The things I am nostalgic for, the MSN Messenger conversations, the forums, the sense of possibility, existed alongside genuine suffering that I was privileged enough to miss.